The Stories of Richard Bausch (10 page)

“Good looks?” she says, standing and putting all her weight on one leg, so that hip juts out.

Lionel walks into the store, and I follow. “How are you,” he says to the man there, in a voice that is not his natural voice; there’s a heavy, sonorous music in it, a sadness. It causes me to stare at him. “Nice place you have, sir.”

And here’s Myra, lugging her heavy stone angel. She sets it down on the
stoop and comes up to where I am, in the doorway. “What’s wrong with Elvin?”

“I think he’s carsick,” I say.

“That’s the thing to do when you’re carsick,” she says, shaking her head. “Sit in the car.” She goes inside and speaks to the proprietor in a soft southern accent—slightly more pronounced than her ordinary speech. “It’s such a lovely day to be up in the mountains.”

I walk over
to the car, and Elvin gets out. “They’re cooking something up,” I say.

He says, “Shit.”

We walk up to the far end of the lot, near the road, and look back down the mountain. There’s a cut in the side of the farthest bluff, in the shape of a giant human ear. It makes me feel as though we should whisper.

“They don’t have any money,” he says.

“Maybe they’re gonna rob the place.”

He says nothing for a beat or two. Then we laugh. It is my conviction that seldom has anyone else on this earth ever laughed in precisely that way, with precisely that amount of ironic agreement and rue.

Myra comes out of the shop and bends to pick up the angel. She makes her way across to the car and sets it down, opens the trunk, and with a great deal of effort, lays it in. Lionel hasn’t come out of the shop yet. She turns and waits, leaning on the open trunk, as if she were propping the lid up with one hand. “Honey?” she calls.

Lionel comes to the doorway and waves at her.

Elvin and I walk down to her. She glances at us over her smooth shoulder and smiles. “Where’ve you two been?”

“I’m hungry,” Elvin tells her.

We watch as she closes the trunk and then crosses the lot, makes a little leap up onto the stoop, and with her hands set to block light on either side of her face, peers through the screen in the door. Then she strolls back out to the little gray crowd of statues.

We watch her decide on another one, a deer bending to drink or graze. She picks this one up and starts toward us.

“We don’t have any money,” Elvin says. “I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing. I heard Lionel talking last night. There’s not a penny. We came
up here to get away from being served something. ‘They can’t serve them to us if we’re in Glass Meadow.’ That’s what he said.”

The proprietor comes out of the shop with Lionel, and together they walk out to the statues, Lionel protesting all the way. Myra reaches us with the deer and opens the trunk again. Elvin and I get into the back as she struggles to get the deer into the trunk with the angel. Coming toward us, with a statue of a Madonna and child, are Lionel and the proprietor, a man we can see now has tattoos on his forearms and bright red hair. Myra has got the deer packed, and she closes the trunk, then turns to face them. “I guess we can put it in back with the boys,” she says.

Elvin and I look at each other.

“Okay, boys,” Myra says, “scootch over.” She opens the door, and the two men step up with their burden. The Madonna looks like Doris Day, and the baby has the face of an old glutton. They get the thing on the seat, and then the men shake hands. Myra closes the door and says, “I don’t know how to thank you.”

“Think nothing of it,” the man says in a voice out of the deep South. He smiles at her, and there is a sorrowful light in his eyes. Myra has that effect on men. But this time, the sorrow I see is for other reasons.

“What’re we gonna do with these?” Elvin says.

Myra waves and smiles at the man as Lionel starts the car. “Thank you,” Myra says. “And God bless you.”

We pull out of the lot, and they start laughing.

“I couldn’t believe he went for it,” Lionel says.

“A sweetie,” says Myra. “A tenderhearted man, I could see it in his eyes.” She lights a cigarette and hands it to him. They look at each other and laugh.

“What did you do?” I say.

“I had him going,” Lionel says. “Didn’t I?”

Myra looks at me. “Your father told that nice man I only had a year to live,” she says. Then she addresses Lionel. “Did you cry?”

“I did,” Lionel says. “Just a touch.”

“Poor man felt so sorry he gave us the statues,” Myra says. “Wasn’t that sweet?”

If this were fiction, I might be tempted to say here that as she sits laughing about the kind man who believes she has a year to live, Myra is indeed only a year away from the end of her life. But it wouldn’t be true.

“We’ll come back and put some money in his mailbox,” Lionel says, glancing at me in the rearview mirror. “Soon as the new job starts and I get some pay.” This is something they will do, too. Quite gladly, and maybe with a bonus of considerably more than they would have paid. It will be another one of their adventures together. Worth the trouble and the expense. And the man’s life will be different; he’ll have a day when he can tell people he found a fifty-dollar bill in his mailbox.

“I thought he was going to give us the whole store,” says Myra. “Didn’t you?”

“What’re we gonna do with the statues?” I say.

“Sell them,” Elvin says. “And buy some food.”

We come to the sign: Glass Meadow. Lionel makes the turn. It’s a dirt and gravel road, and a column of dust rises behind us. The back of the car is sunk down like the hotrods I’ve coveted at school in the afternoons, and the Madonna with her ugly child in her arms rocks with our motion, as if she’s alive for those few seconds. I’ve got one hand on the rough stone shoulder, trying to steady it. The head is an inch from my ear.

“What’s she telling you?” Myra asks me.

“What about food?” Elvin says.

“Plenty to eat when we get there,” says Myra.

At the end of the deepest part of the shade is light—an open blue space. We come out of the trees into a wide field dotted with yellow flowers. The cabin is at the other end of the field, looking as though it’s about to sag into the tall weeds that have nearly engulfed it. We pull off the dirt road and into the grass, right up to the porch—briefly I think we’re going to hit it—and when we stop, Lionel turns the engine off and seems to listen. We all watch him. Slowly, almost as if the motion causes him pain, he turns to us and smiles. “Well?” he says. “What’re you all waiting for?”

We leave the Madonna on the seat and file up onto the porch, which is bleached to a tan in the sun, hot and creaky and rickety, with cobwebs everywhere and signs of rodent infestation. Myra produces the key from the bottom of her purse. She opens the door and walks in, and Lionel steps in behind her. It’s hot, airless, tenebrous: the floor sounds as if the wood might break.

“Get some windows open,” Myra says. Lionel does this, winding a squeaky crank. He’s got a look on his face, all concentration.

There’s a ladderlike stair opposite the front door, with silky webs blocking it. The kitchenette contains a small icebox. The door is standing open.

“Great,” Elvin says. “No food.”

“That’s no way to talk,” Lionel says, finishing with the window. “We gotta get into the spirit of things.”

“Oh, for God’s sakes, Lionel,” says Myra from the other side of the room. “That
is
ridiculous.”

“You said there’d be food up here,” he says.

“I was wrong.” She starts opening and closing cabinets in the kitchenette.

“You know you might’ve checked with Betty about the food.”

“When I came up here with her that time, we didn’t pack food. The place was stocked.”

“That was three years ago.”

“Well, I’m just saying there was food here.”

“There’s no food here now,” Lionel says with emphasis.

“She and Woody were just here in June.”

He repeats the phrase. “There’s no food here
now.”

“I thought there’d be food,” Myra says. “When do you want the divorce?”

“Today,” he says loudly. “Let’s make a big goddamn ceremony out of the whole goddamn thing and invite a lot of people with food.”

I take Elvin by the arm, and we step out onto the tumbledown porch. Myra mutters a few unintelligible words, and then we hear the chink of dishes clattering against each other.

“They’re not your dishes, Myra.” There’s a pause. I turn to see that Elvin has his hands over his ears.

But Lionel comes to the doorway and speaks quickly to us. “Bring your stuff in from the car if you want.”

“It’ll keep,” I say. I have no idea where I learned the phrase—it might have been at the Saturday matinees—but in the moment I say it I feel very grown-up. I feel, in fact, older than Lionel and Myra, as Lionel closes the door and the shouting begins.

“Shit,” Elvin says, and spits into the dust.

We walk out to the car. We hear glass shattering, their contesting voices. It continues for a minute or two and then is quiet. We are old enough and
experienced enough to know that this furor means nothing. We are not even upset by it; it’s an annoyance, something in the way of whatever else is next.

Lionel comes storming out of the house, his hands shoved down into the pockets of his jeans. He comes over to us. His lips are white, his cheekbones flushed, looking blotched. “Boys, I want you to do me a favor.” He reaches into his pocket, brings out a small folding knife, and holds it toward me. “We’re on our own, boys. So I need you to go out and rustle up some grub.”

I take the knife.

“Go out and find something we can cook. Do it.”

I can only stare at him, and that is what Elvin is doing too.

“Well” Lionel says. “What’re you waiting for”

“Oh, come on, Dad,” I say.

He takes the knife from me and gives it to Elvin. “We can eat squirrel and rabbit or quail or even pheasant if you can get close enough.”

We stare at him.

“Go on,” he says, waving his arms. We start off toward the line of trees at the edge of the field.

“Oh,” Myra says from the doorway of the cabin, “that’s wonderful—what’re you doing, putting it all on them”

“No,” Lionel says as Elvin and I move off. “They’re going to do some
foraging.
Out with the wild bears where it’s safe.”

We stop, and then Elvin, thinking about the bears, I’m sure, starts back.

Lionel won’t let him. “Go on. There’s no bears up here. Do as I said.”

We head toward the woods again, and I hear the stuttering of Elvin’s breath, the thing that sometimes happens to his mildly asthmatic lungs when he’s agitated. “Bears,” he says, as though nothing could be more outlandish; it’s a hedge against the fear operating in him. We come to the first row of trees and pause together, hearing the storm go on behind us, the voices carrying across the field.

“I suppose you think I
planned
it about the food.”

“No, it was the
lack
of planning that I’m concerned with.”

“Oh, you mean, like quitting one job before you have another one?”

“I thought we’d have money from the band. How’d I know Floyd’d fink out on us?”

“Well,
I
didn’t know there wouldn’t be any food.”

The cabin door slams shut. There’s more shouting, but the words dissolve in distance as Elvin and I make our way into the trees, finding a thin path that winds through heavy undergrowth and around boulders the size of cement trucks. On one jagged wall-sized stone someone has carved the words
GLASS MEADOW,
1946. We pause there, looking around.

“Bears,” Elvin says.

I’m beginning to feel a sense of adventure, being in the woods, on the hunt. I think of it that way. We’re on the hunt. We’re after food. I can picture the look on Lionel’s face as we trudge out of the trees with a string of killed squirrels and pheasants, a week’s worth of meat.

“We’re going to take it slow and careful from here,” I say.

“Let’s just go back now,” Elvin says. “I don’t like it here. There’s too many trees.”

“Shut up,” I tell him. “Give me the knife.”

“What’re you gonna do with it? You know they’re not serious.”

“I’m gonna kill something to eat,” I say.

He looks at me. I
am,
after all, the older brother. When he hands me the knife, I open it, crouching down—a Cheyenne, setting myself for the hunt.

“You’re kidding,” he says. “Come on, Patrick.”

I don’t answer. I head off along the path, keeping low, complete stealth. He follows. For a few minutes, there’s just the sound of being in the woods. We traverse a small creek and climb a steep, rocky embankment, where we encounter a few birds. I put the knife in my belt and pick up a stone.

“Oh, right,” Elvin says.

I’m concentrating. It’s as though he’s merely along as a witness—a referee or judge. I try to hit a blackbird and something smaller with a dark tawny coloring in the wings. I miss, of course. At the top of the embankment we find a barbed-wire fence. We have always called it bobwire because that’s the way we’ve heard it said. I hold it up for Elvin to crawl through, and then I get down and he holds it for me. On the other side, the ground rises gradually as we come out of the trees, up into a sunny field of tall grass, swarming with flies.

“I don’t know,” Elvin says.

We head around the perimeter of the field, and I make a couple of passes at squirrels, who are too quick and alert to be stalked by someone like me. They chatter at each other from opposite branches of a tree, as if
they are talking about us, exchanging opinions. At the far end of the fence, in a little shaded area of tall old apple trees, is a black-and-white cow, standing in a cloud of flies, tail-swishing, slowly chewing, staring at us with the placid, steady expression of the species, hardly seeming to mark our approach through the grass along the wide curve of the woods and fence. We come to within about ten feet of her and stop. Somewhere crows are getting up a racket as if they have divined our purpose and mean to sound the alarm.

“What” Elvin says, and I realize that he hasn’t understood why we’ve halted here.